Washed Clean

The joys and the justice of making your own soap

Delwyn Riordan

Glenn Daniels and Delwyn mix the lye (caustic soda and water).

It is a
Saturday morning, and while children run around ovals all over the state, kick
various shapes of ball and generally get very grubby, a group of friends gather
outside a kitchen in Footscray. Mixing
caustic soda with water causes fumes to fly and we all retreat inside where the
work of weighing, measuring and warming begins.
As the oils melt and merge, conversation flows. Soap, children, ethical purchasing, school,
gardening - the topics are as varied as the interests of those in the
room. The one subject it continues to
return to is the soap.

The recipe
is simple - coconut oil, olive oil, lye (caustic soda mixed with water) and a
selection of essential oils. The
simplicity belies the science of soap making where all oils are not created
equal. We have chosen our oils and
ratios carefully to give a soap which will be hard enough to last, and will
also lather well. We have also chosen
oils which work well together and allow us to avoid palm oil.

Palm oil is
one of the most commonly used oils in the cosmetic and food industries, and it
comes at a huge environmental cost. Most
palm oil is produced in Borneo and Sumatra,
where rapid clearing of rainforest for palm oil production is destroying the
habitat of orangutan’s at such a rate that it is predicted they will be extinct
in 20 years, with Sumatran tigers also being placed under extreme
pressure. In Indonesia
and Malaysia
it is estimated that rainforests are being cleared at the rate of 300 football
fields per minute, predominantly for the production of palm oil. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there
are alternative sites where palm oil could be produced, with at least 300 - 700
million hectares of abandoned land globally that could potentially be used for
palm oil production.

What is palm
oil, and why is it so popular? Palm oil
is an edible oil produced agriculturally from the fruit of the oil palm
tree. There are two varieties of this
tree, one originating in West Africa and
the other in Central and South America. Two distinct types of oil are extracted from
the fruit of the tree, with edible palm oil coming from the pulp of the fruit,
and palm kernel oil coming from the seed of the fruit and being used in the
manufacture of cosmetics. The palm oil
tree is extremely productive, yielding 10 times the rate per hectare of other
vegetable oils, such as soybean oil and it is also an extremely versatile oil. As many as 50% of the packaged food products
on our supermarket shelves contain palm oil, though we find very few mentions
of it on ingredient lists.

One of the
great difficulties we face in attempting to avoid palm oil in our foods, soaps
and cosmetics is the lack of transparency in the labeling of palm oil in the
products we buy every day. Did you know
that the descriptor “vegetable oil” could mean palm oil? As consumers we are placed in the position of
actively supporting the unsustainable production of palm oil through our every
day shopping without even knowing that we are doing so! If we were shopping in the USA, we would read “palm oil” on the label and
know exactly what we were purchasing, but laws around food labeling in Australia do
not require this level of detail.

Back in
Footscray, I’m enjoying melting coconut oil - our coconut oil has come from
small communities in the Pacific, where local people grow and harvest the
coconuts and then extract the rich, high quality cold pressed oil within hours
of the nut leaving the tree. This crop
neither enslaves the grower, nor destroys important habitat in the developing
world. It also smells great as it melts.
I picture the small, open shed in Tonga where I watched, eight years ago, as
women and men worked together to extract this oil. First, removing the thick husk from the
coconut, then breaking it open and scraping out the fresh, white flesh from
inside the nut. The shredded coconut
then warms gently on a heated plate until it reaches just the right temperature
and dryness when it is packed into the press and a woman pulls down on the
handle until the clear, fresh oil flows into the bucket waiting below, the
whole process taking less than an hour.
I remember people working together, communities growing stronger as they
add value to this crop which in the past was exported as copra, the dried
coconut meat, and value added in other, richer, countries. I remember the astute business women and men
in Samoa and Tonga
who work hard to achieve greater independence for their people.

I also
remember other soap making days! Where
friends have worked together to produce something we need, and can use. Where in a small way we have loosened our
dependence on the great machine of industrial production. When we take back our independence we
liberate ourselves from those who would tie us to eternal consumption; of
products, of coal based energy, of the skills of others. Soap making is not hard! It requires some care, some thought and a few
tools but it is well within the reach of most.

Something is
created when we work together, something which reaches beyond the product of
our labour. I am reminded of a novel
I’ve been reading. Set during World War
II, a family has had news of a son missing in action. The local priest visits to offer comfort but
there is something missing between them, they don’t connect in any real way and
he leaves feeling that he has not offered something to them, but they to
him. A friend of the family later
reflects that the priest has no claim to speak of a son to this family because
“He never done a day’s work with us in his life, nor could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat
and go down the row with us..”. While we
aren’t sweating over the work of soap making, and our livelihoods don’t depend
on it, we are creating much more than soap.
Our common goal connects us with each other, our conversation changes
our thoughts spill out, we learn to know each other and ourselves in a
different way.

The other
thing I love about soap making is the pleasure of using something that I have made,
something that I understand. I think we
use things differently when we know them well, when something has been made
through our own effort we not only appreciate it, but we cease to take it for
granted. Soap is no longer just another
item I pick off the supermarket shelf, it is something I think about every so
often and work for a few times a year.
If we run out of our own soap I feel that. I would love to extend this thought and care
to some of the other things I use regularly, when I think about the things I
use in a day there are many that I use quite thoughtlessly; that I couldn’t
make and don’t understand. It seems to
me that this disconnection is at the heart of some of the more pressing
environmental and social issues of our time.

Now that my
children are home, and covered in mud I’m pleased to have my cold processed
vegetable oil soap, free of palm oil and rich in stories to clean their grubby
bodies... thank you friends.

Nick Xenophon, the
independent Senator for South
Australia has introduced a bill to parliament calling
for “Truth in Labelling” visit this website to find out more and add your name
to the online petition.